Buy: Once upon a Time in Great Britain Visit London, cheap Dinner & a show in London Somerset House shimmers London's Indian flavor Visit Oxford like a student More on the British Isles
Take a child to a place he only imagined
By Stephen H. Morgan, Globe Staff, 10/20/02
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Buy: Once upon a Time in Great Britain Visit London, cheap Dinner & a show in London Somerset House shimmers London's Indian flavor Visit Oxford like a student More on the British Isles
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Neverland and Narnia, Toad Hall and Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, Hogwarts and Middle-Earth, Mr. McGregor's garden and the Hundred Acre Wood — what an itinerary for a vacation tour of Britain!
Melanie Wentz's travel guide "Once Upon a Time in Great Britain" is a ticket to the magical places of childhood. Some exist solely in the imagination, while others are as real now as on the day their features were rendered with pen on paper by Britain's best children's authors.
Embarking with her family for a year's stay in England and Scotland, she writes, Wentz hunted for a guidebook to "help me locate the Britain that was alive in my imagination: Mary Poppins's London, Pooh Bear's Hundred Akre Wood, or Charlie's chocolate factory." She found none. So she spent the year abroad writing one.
The result is a delightful treasury of details about the lives and landscapes of the people who created some of our most enduring children's stories. It can be the basis for a family vacation to Great Britain — offering discoveries for all ages, even young children, to relate to and remember — or an adjunct to reading children's books at home.
She covers the works of 26 authors, including such classics as "Peter Pan," "Alice in Wonderland," "Peter Rabbit," "The Wind in the Willows," "The Chronicles of Narnia," "The Hobbit," "Robin Hood," and more recent stories like "Thomas the Tank Engine," "101 Dalmatians," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and the Harry Potter books.
Each chapter starts with a very brief, well-written biography of an author and often of the book's illustrator as well, offering fascinating insights into the unusual ways these tales came into being. Wentz writes that J. M. Barrie, the author of "Peter Pan," was a diminutive man, perhaps accounting for the theme of "the boy who never grew up" in his many works. Hugh Lofting originally wrote his Dr. Dolittle stories, about a doctor who talks to animals, in letters to his children while he was posted at the front during World War I.
Next are details on the real places connected with the stories: the author's home or workplace (such as Nicolson's Cafe in Edinburgh, where J. K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book while her baby napped) or any monuments to the storyteller or the hero (such as the Peter Pan statue in London's Kensington Gardens).
The best part is discovering the real physical settings that gave rise to the fictional landscapes. I've enjoyed reading the stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin countless times with my own children, never realizing that the wood whose spelling befuddled Christopher was a faithful rendering of Ashdown Forest, near author A. A. Milne's home south of London. And though I've crossed Scotland's Great Rannoch Moor by train a couple of times, learning it was the setting for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped" makes another visit — to the book and the place — essential.
Likewise, the "Aha!"s resound when you learn that the neglected garden behind a locked door in Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 tale, "The Secret Garden," is a real garden in Kent and can be visited, although the original, rather spooky house, Great Maytham Hall, has been replaced since the author lived there. Or that the landscape of Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter Rabbit is much as Beatrix Potter knew it in England's Lake District. Similarly, you can visit the stretch of the River Thames that inspired Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" and recount the adventures of Badger, Ratty, and Mr. Toad.
Some of the connections are a reach. The chapter on the Harry Potter series, for example, dwells heavily on locations where movie filming took place, such as Northumberland's Alnwick Castle and Oxford's Bodleian Library, which may leave young readers wondering where the original written stories "really" took place.
However, Wentz truly does search far and wide for something to help readers young and old connect with their favorite stories. She clues us, for example, to where Beatrix Potter's original drawings of Peter Rabbit are displayed, invites us to the London Zoo to hear about the real bear from Winnipeg that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh's name, and explores the remnants of the Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood's time.
Where such connections are sparse, she shows great imagination in suggesting ways to satisfy young fans — such as flying a kite on London's Primrose Hill a la Mary Poppins, or visiting a place where shepherds "talk" to their sheepdogs like Dr. Dolittle.
In a nice touch, Wentz even includes details on six popular British children's stories that may be less familiar to American readers, such as "Greyfriars Bobby," based on the Scottish terrier who stayed near his late master's graveside in Edinburgh for 14 years.
One addition that would have helped potential travelers with itinerary planning is a map of Britain marked with a "children's book trail." A number of sites are clustered in London, Edinburgh, Oxford, and elsewhere; even though they are well referenced in the text, the lack of a visual aid requires a lot of back and forth to see which places are near one another.
For any grown-ups with a child in their lives — or just a bit of childhood still lodged in their hearts — this is a guidebook sure to be read over and over, at home and while traveling.